Reading devices use optical character recognition (OCR) and text-to-speech (TTS) i.e., speech synthesis software to read aloud and thus convey printed matter to visually and developmentally impaired individuals. Reading devices read text from books, journals, and so forth.
Reading devices can use commercial off-the-shelf flat-bed scanners, a personal computer and OCR software. The computer processes an image with the OCR software and produces a text file. The text file is fed to text-to-speech synthesis software to provide electrical signals that are fed to audio output devices to render speech and thus read any recognized text aloud to the user.
One manner in which a reading device can capture an image is through an imaging device that is attached to the reading device. One such use is to capture images of a scene to convey content of the scene to a user. A scene can represent contents of an image that is being read. A scene can be a memo or a page of a book, or it can be a door in a hallway of an office building. The type of real-world contexts to “read” may include visual elements that are words, symbols or pictures, colors and so forth.
In addition to processing the image to recognize text, other recognition processes can include object recognition, such as recognizing faces, expressions on faces and so forth.